I just transferred my pse9 catalog from my windows pc to a new mac (10.6 OS). I can see all the photos in my catalog on the mac, but although I can delete photos from the mac, I can't delete them from the mac hard drive (I get a message saying "one or more of the files is locked or read-only). I have been to the apple store, and they can't see why this would be an issue, as all the files have the proper permissions, etc. Any thoughts? I want to use PSE9 on the mac but need to be able to delete unwanted photos from the mac hard drive. Thanks!.

Yes, I did a backup in PSE9 for windows onto a portable hard drive, and then I did a restore of the backup onto the mac. I am stumped about what to do to try to solve the inability to delete from the mac hard drive.

In looking through my files. On my PC, in my "Picture" folder I have 45 folders with my photos.

On my Mac, in the folder "My Pictures" inside Documents, I have an additional folder "My Catalog" in the same directory as the picture folders, inside that folder are 8 files: backupct.dat, breezedata, catalog.pse9db, collstatus,dat, face.thumb.9.cache, syncdb, tagstatus.dat, and thumb.5.cache.--perhaps, are these files in the wrong place?

Should the 45 folders with my photos been restored to a different directory?

If you create a new catalog and import one of the undeletable files, does it behave the same way? Also, can you option-delete any of them?

At this point, I think I would just try clearing out everything and running the restore again. I don't know what else to suggest--this isn't any kind of known issue, and you say all the permissions are right. It's pretty common for images from windows cds to appear locked in OS X, but then they do show the locked checkbox as on.

I am adding to this thread because I am having the same problem, but on a PC, and have to assume the issue must not be as uncommon as you think.

My problem is a little different, in that the majority of my photos are stored on an external harddrive. (I keep only the most recent photos on the laptop.) After purchasing a laptop, I upgraded (finally) from PSE 3 to PSE 9 and imported all photos into the new program, leaving their storage location on the external.

I have no problem deleting an unwanted photo from my computer's hard drive, but when deleting from the external hard drive I get the "read only or locked...cannot be deleted from hard drive" message. The photo will then delete from my catalog (I don't seem to have an option to cancel), and I then have to find the actual picture and do another delete from the external hard drive. A huge hassle.

You may be on to something, DJ. The last computer ran XP and this drive was only used on my account and I was an administrator. Hopefully, I can figure out how to easily change the permission. We have people coming for dinner, so I will hopefully figure it out late this evening or tomorrow.

Hope you're still around, DJ. I am just now getting back to this. I changed permissions on the exernal to allow everyone full control, and still get the error message saying files are "read only or locked and cannot be deleted from the hard drive". I can delete from PSE organizer, and then find the file on the hard drive and delete it that way, so it appears that the issue is with PSE organizer. Does that make sense to you?